Chairman of the Sandwich Board

By Jamey Hecht

I left my apartment carrying two protest signs in a garbage bag.
There was plenty of time to get to the Not In Our Name demonstration
at the UN, but it turned out I had misread the calendar. I learned
this by arriving at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza to find a few pigeons and
a lonely man raking leaves. What to do?

I'd gotten up that morning with the firm intention of protesting
a war that I consider unnecessary, venal and likely to result in the
deaths of several thousand ladies, gentlemen and kids. Opposing such
a war already puts me in a minority, and if I can tolerate marching
down the street with two hundred of my fellow pinkos, I ought to be
able to make the same statement on my own. But I've got two signs
with me, nobody's here, and it's freezing.

Next move: buy gloves from a street vendor. Then, into a 42nd
Street bodega for string and a nail clipper to snip it with. Four
pencil-holes later, I'm wearing a sandwich-board and marching across
Manhattan like some 21st Century Tom Paine -- or, depending on how
you look at it, like a humorless alarmist with a freaky lack of
people skills. The latter perception proved much more common. Loners
with sandwich boards tend to be heavily influenced by some
combination of Jack Daniels and the Book of Revelations, and their
placards generally urge us to repent (for something, usually
blasphemy or covetousness, rather than a violation of the Nuremberg
Charter). This must have been what prevented so many people from
actually reading what my ultra-legible signs said: "SANCTIONS DID THE
KILLING" on the front, and "STOP THESE RACIST WARS" on the back. In
somewhat smaller print I wrote "5,000 Iraqi kids dead each month
since 1991."

The reactions generally broke down into three categories, which
I'll call Smiley, Grumpy, and Ignorey (any resemblance to my doctoral
dissertation committee of 10 years ago is purely accidental). Smiley
was the reaction of about 15% of my fellow New Yorkers; their eyes
twinkled, they grinned, they winked, they gave me the thumbs-up. A
man pointed to my giant square of oak-tag and declared, "I respect
that!" Another called me courageous, and some people even thanked me.
Around two-thirds of these were African-American or Hispanic (which
makes some sense, if only because of what my congressman, Charles
Rangel, recently pointed out: Blacks make up 35% of the armed forces,
but only 12% of the general population). More women nodded in
agreement than men. So much for Smiley.

Grumpy, in his many incarnations, smirks and rolls his eyes. A
gaggle of suits cheers me on with palpable sarcasm: "Oh, a
progressive -- riiiight," and then it's back to cell phones and
cigars. A baby-boomer in a Monte Carlo rolls his window down and
shouts, "You protest your own country? What's wrong with you?
Saddam's a lunatic! He bombs his own people!" Too cold to think, I
fail to mention the 30% of Gulf War Veterans who are slowly dying
from exposure to Depleted Uranium from US munitions. With no time to
invoke the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, Rocky Flats, Wounded Knee,
Kent State, or Waco, I yell, "We created Saddam!" As the red
tail-lights disappear, it dawns on me that once again I've said "we"
when I really mean CIA, DIA, NSA, DOD. It is my country, but it's
their State. Years ago Max Weber defined that term: "the State is
whatever successfully seeks a monopoly on the legitimate use of
force." Of course, "legitimate" means "official."

Pretending not to notice was the most common response, the middle
of the bell-curve. But a bespectacled, well-dressed man covered in
eight square feet of cardboard is hard to miss. When you avert your
eyes from that, it's not an accident. Kierkegaard called it "armed
neutrality." One woman shook my hand and told me how worried she was:
"We're rushing down the hill with no brakes. I'm looking around, and
everybody's asleep." I mentioned Ionesco's play Rhinoceros, in which
one Parisian after another is transformed into that unstoppable
pachyderm. Single-minded and armored like a tank, this animal was the
Italian playwright's metaphor for fascist sympathizers. Just like the
citizens in its direct literary descendent, Invasion of the Body
Snatchers, each character in Rhinoceros loses all personal autonomy
at the moment of surrender to mass militarism. Those are eerie
scripts. If it's a moral injury to forfeit your capacity for dissent,
it's much scarier to move among the pod-people with dissent written
all over you.

I tried this again two weeks later. This time I went to Union
Square instead of Midtown, hoping a younger crowd might find a fellow
Gen-Xer more relatable. That didn't happen. Shopping happened.
Serious individuals strode into the subway; jovial foursomes ambled
toward the movies. Across the park, numbers flashed on that weird
strip of illuminated digits that advertises nothing but looks so
pretty (it's part of a giant conceptual art piece called
"Metronome"). Near the Lincoln Tunnel there used to be a similar
number-clock, but it was actually measuring something (the national
debt, in fact). These numbers are just for show, because the central
ones change at incredible speed while the numbers on the ends stay
the same. I'm staring at this incandescent funstorm of
non-information when I suddenly realize how late it's gotten, and how
dark, and cold. Whether my dissent is preposterous or brave or both,
night is falling and I need soup.